The Healing Power of Writing

Writing your story by using your own creative voice is an adventure in healing! It helps to connect the thoughts and words with layers and levels of healing due to a variety of painful experiences. Healing provides a new perspective, helps in letting go of the past and provides a path to forgiveness and compassion.

Self-reflective writing helps to organize and focus the experience to heal illness, loss, grief and life-altering transitions. Writing helps to validate experiences and to access our inner healer in order to gain a fresh perspective to find courage and hope. It is a way to learn from the past, plan for the future and to get through a crisis. When a traumatic event occurs, or we undergo a major life transition, our minds have to work overtime to process the experience.

Change comes from understanding both the positive and the negative aspects of our experience. Writing helps us to gain confidence in our ability to find hope, grace and renewal. Healing does not come from pushing to forget the hurt. It comes from remembering the hurt, to put it into perspective and to find a place in the memory to store it as a guidance tool.

Writing about difficult or painful experiences can be a healing tool to strengthen the immune system. Recognize and express the pain in the privacy of your journal or talk with a Therapist. If it is too painful, maybe too soon, stop to allow the grieving process to advance.

Identify when you have become overwhelmed by grief, when the feelings have become too much to handle. Seek professional help to heal. The pain that comes from a loss shows we can love!

Take the time to grieve in order to work through the agony of a sickness, worry, anxiety and the loss of people, a job, money and other daily upsets. Endings create new beginnings.

Healing is the process by which the body is continually trying to get back into balance. Writing is a path to healing. It organizes those anxious feelings and helps you to get past them. Writing puts the memories in order so they can be stored as a part of you that uses those remembrances to make peace with the past, so you don’t mess up the present.

If writing about the events is too much to handle, yet you want to write about them, switch the voice from first person to third person. Example: Instead of saying “I carefully walked up the front steps”, talk through the character in your story by saying “She carefully walked up the front steps.”